“Spear and Fang” (Weird Tales, July 1925) was Robert E. Howard’s premiere as an author. He was only nineteen when it appeared in Weird Tales. The story is set in a prehistoric world and doesn’t feature the usual Sword-swinging barbarians he was later famous for. Despite this, it is still a Howard story and daring-do will happen.
The plot is pretty simple: A-aea the beautiful prehistoric maiden is kidnapped by Ka-nanu, a Neanderthal. Ga-Nor, whom she loves, had been painting the cave wall with a mammoth. Now he must rescue her before she is raped. Ga-Nor hears the girl scream and launches his attack on Ka-nanu. The two men fight a desperate battle. The Neanderthal gets Ga-Nor in a bear hug. The smaller man wedges his elbow into the monster’s throat until he let’s go. Now free, Ga-Nor uses his ax to cleave the giant’s head in half. The two survivors return to caveman domestic bliss.
The story is short (and received no illustration) and by no means Howard’s best. It received no mentions in “The Eyrie”. It was good enough to get Farnsworth Wright to buy it and begin their eleven-year relationship. The sub-genre of “caveman fiction” is much older than the Pulps. In the 1860s the first novels of prehistoric man appear with authors surmising what life in the dawn of time was like. These range from almost academic to adventurous. Two authors of these early stories would have caught Howard’s attention.
“A Story of the Stone Age” by H. G. Wells was first published in The Idler, May 1897. (May-September 1897) and later reprinted by Hugo Gernsback in Amazing Stories, November 1927. The story has a very similar but lengthier version of males rescuing females. Also “The Grisly Folk” published in The Storyteller (April 1921) has Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals squaring off. This story also inspired other writers like Manly Wade Wellman and his Hok the Mighty series. Howard would have seen these in the story collections of Mr. Wells’s work.
The 1906 novel Before Adam, “When the World was Young” (The Saturday Evening Post, September 10, 1910) and “The Strength of the Strong” (Hampton’s Magazine, March 1911) by Jack London would also have been an influence. “When the World was Young” has time travel, which Howard would use in “People of the Dark” (Strange Tales, June 1932). Much of Robert E. Howard’s ideas on Darwinian Survivalism came from Jack London. The posthumous novel Almuric (1939) was perhaps Howard’s most brutal version of a hard-lived world.
Roy Thomas and Richard Corben adapted the story for Robert E. Howard’s Mythmaker (1999). Thomas updates the information on the Neanderthal by having his kidnapper mute. In the story Ka-nanu speaks to A-aea, telling her not to resist. Howard was writing in the 1920s and Thomas seventy years later, so information of prehistoric man has improved greatly in those decades. It doesn’t really change the story anyway.
Huh, it seems that Thomas has regressed the Neanderthal, as he looks like a baboon, and there’s evidence that they had some sort of speech. The ‘apes kidnapping pretty girls’ is a hoary old trope, of course, and Wright must’ve bought it more on prose than on plot or idea.